Firefox milestone: Too many bookmarks

I think I've reached yet another freaking milestone with Firefox. Basically, I had too many bookmarks.

My old bookmarks collection has been kind of accumulating over the years. I think I originally started collecting this cruft in late 1990s on Linux version of Netscape Navigator, and it just kept getting imported on new profiles. I switched to Mozilla Suite, then Firebird/Firefox.

Here's the thing: It was never particularly well organised. There were huge swathes of unorganised bookmarks. I recently importer all of the garbage I had saved in Pocket.

So in the end, I had 7,832 bookmarks.

I decided the best course of action was to export this to file (the JSON backup format and HTML), keep that as a future reference only, and reset the bookmark file to its humble beginnings.

Why? Because Firefox Sync wasn't keeping up.

Sure, it worked perfectly on desktop OS versions of Firefox (I'm using Iceweasel on Debian, and Firefox on Ubuntu and Windows), but on Android, when faced with ginormous amounts of bookmarks, it apparently has an tendency to do partial syncs.

Incidentally, partial syncs never lead to you losing bookmarks, but you may end up losing folder information. So my already badly organised bookmarks just ended up being even more badly organised.

The most annoying feature was that no matter how much I reorganised the bookmarks on desktop, the sync with Android devices was making them crapped up again, unless I specifically told the desktop Firefox to restart the sync from beginning, tell it to make other devices forget their bookmarks and replace them with these, and pray to whatever gods there be that the sync actually completes on Android.

I absolutely love Firefox Sync, but I guess what we learnt from this is that when I start forgetting where all these damn bookmarks go, then maybe Firefox won't remember them either, and it's a high time for both of our sake that we start from the beginning. =)